At the Intersection of Despair and Belief

Last year around this time, I was preparing for my hysterectomy surgery. It has been almost a year now without my uterus and I’m happy to report that the terribly debilitating pain that damn organ caused me is pretty much all gone and I am slowly but surely finding my way back to a more active lifestyle. Thank goodness.

Anyway, a poem I wrote after my surgery was recently published in the Fall issue of Whale Road Review. “October (After My Hysterectomy)” is also part of my upcoming collection, April, and Back Again, which is set to be published on February 24, 2026. Woohoo, I have a publication date! It’s all very exciting.

If you’d like a little sneak peek of the collection, be sure to check out “October (After My Hysterectomy)” and why not peruse the rest of Whale Road Review’s new issue while you’re at it.

As always, thanks for reading and for all of your support!

At the Intersection of Despair and Belief

On the main road that runs between my son’s school and our house, there is an intersection where cars frequently roll through the stop sign. I think about this intersection every Monday through Friday at around 2:30 in the afternoon. I picture it with my son lying in the middle of the crosswalk, his neon red bike a mangled pile of metal beside him. I picture it empty, no cars in sight and him, cruising through unharmed. Every day, one image flashing and then the other, a compulsive little cycle of fear and relief that I am powerless to stop.

This is the first year where my eight-year-old is responsible for getting himself home from school. He bikes or he walks, and this bit of freedom, this growing independence has done wonders for his mood. And mine as well. It is so nice not to have race out the door at 2 o’clock to pick him up from school. To not have to wake my toddler, shove a bunch of snacks in a bag and practically run a mile uphill in order to arrive in time for the far-too-early end of the school day.

He arrives home red-cheeked and smiling, a pile of mail in his hands because he always stops to grab whatever is in our mailbox. I am loving it and I am hating it. I am so thrilled to have one responsibility struck from my busy schedule, and so sad to see the ways in which I’m needed disappearing faster than I had anticipated. And then of course there’s that damn intersection. Not the intersection in adolescence where your child is still so young in some ways and so grown in others and you somehow have to figure out how to travel both of these roads at once, though we have certainly reached that point, but the actual physical intersection along my son’s bike route home where seventy-five percent of the drivers either never learned what a stop sign means or are too busy looking at their phones to notice one.

I trust my son wholeheartedly. I trust almost no one else. This is what makes this new phase of parenting feel especially stressful even while it feels so glorious—I have to believe that other people will look out for him and take care of him when I am not there to do the looking and the caring. I have to believe that people will roll up to an intersection and lift their eyes for a moment to check that there’s no one in their path. That someone will come to his aid if he needs it. Will drop everything in their own busy, stressful life to make sure my child is okay. I have to believe that community, our collective responsibility towards maintaining each other’s safety and well-being, has not been lost entirely. And I do. Deep down, I do believe. There are so many good, caring, thoughtful people everywhere. But then I look at the state of the world and I know there are also far too many people who simply don’t give a shit.

And, of course, far too many who are actively causing harm.

Just before the school year started, my family spent a morning at a mikveh. My boys had to submerge themselves in water to officially become Jewish. (My husband is Jewish, but I am not and the synagogue we belong to required that they do a mikveh because technically my boys are converting to Judaism since I am not Jewish. Religions, man. Whatever.) After some initial nervousness, my older son kind of loved it because it was basically just floating around in a deep bath. And my toddler was so shocked by having his head fully submerged that his complaints quickly turned to stunned silence. I had some complicated feelings about the whole thing in the week leading up to it which I won’t go into detail about here because it’s none of your business and also because I’ve gotten over them and the whole experience was quick and easy, and no big deal. What my feelings essentially boiled down to, though, was a fear that my children will be hated for being Jewish.

As my husband correctly pointed out, this was kind of a pointless fear as it related to the mikveh. My children were already Jewish. We think of them as Jewish, we’re raising them to be Jewish, we observe Jewish holidays and traditions. Anyone who would hate them for being Jewish would hate them either way, he argued, mikveh or not. Obviously, he was right, but in the moment, I clung to some false sense of being able to protect them from the world.

For the past week, we have watched the right wing, feckless liberals, and practically every media outlet in existence fawn over Charlie Kirk and call for civility in the wake of the man’s death. People are losing their jobs for simply pointing out the hateful, dangerous rhetoric that Kirk constantly spouted. You want to know who would hate my children for being Jewish? Charlie Kirk, and anyone who listened to what he had to say and thought it was anything other than abhorrent bullshit. He shouldn’t have been shot and killed because no one should be shot and killed, gun violence is a horrific (and avoidable!) scourge on our society, but if you’re gonna have a country full of guns, some people are going to die because of them. No one believed that more than Charlie Kirk.

I feel like I am coming apart at the seams. The two thin threads holding me together are my responsibility to my children, and my absolute refusal to let a bunch of bloated, fascists d-bags break me completely. But good god, this is so much to take. I feel like a deer lately—constantly on alert, incapable of being chill. It is impossible to feel rested even when doing something restful. I cannot find peace or ease in any of my usual activities or coping methods. I cannot find release or relief no matter what I do or where I turn. I have to go to bed each night and try to find some way to shut off the noise in my brain. I have to wake up each morning and try to access the calm, gentle demeanor that is required for parenting. I want to punch something or shake something or just start running and never stop. I want to run myself to death.

On my son’s first day of school, I met him on the playground and then walked behind him as he biked himself home. I wanted to watch him bike the route one time before I left him to do it on his own. I wanted to see him pass through each intersection carefully. To have an image in my mind of him traveling safely from school to home. At one point he got too far ahead of me and I couldn’t keep up and he disappeared from sight. I saw him turn a corner and then I didn’t see him again until I got back home where he was waiting for me at the back door.

I feel a little bit like I’m watching our country disappear from sight and I can’t move fast enough to keep my eyes on it, to pull it back to safety. I don’t really know what to do in this moment. I don’t know how best to save or protect the people and things that are most meaningful to me in our culture apart from continuing to celebrate and support them in whatever small ways I can. I have to believe there are enough of us out there who feel this way, who still believe in community and our collective responsibility to keep each other safe and healthy, and happy. And I do believe this. Deep down, I do. I trust that eventually, we will find our way home.

You can find more of my writing & contact information at clairemtaylor.com. If you’d like to further support my work, please consider purchasing one of my books, or a copy of Little Thoughts Press. I also have a ko-fi page.